Influence Maximization in Sentiment Propagation With Multisearch Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Sentiment propagation plays a crucial role in the continuous emergence of social public opinion and network group events. By analyzing the maximum Influence of sentiment propagation, we can gain a better understanding of how network group events arise and evolve. Influence maximization (IM) is a critical fundamental issue in the field of informatics, whose purpose is to identify the collection of individuals and maximize the specific information’s influence in real-world social networks, and the sentiments expressed by nodes with the greatest influence can significantly impact the emotions of the entire group. The IM issue has been established to be an NP-hard (nondeterministic polynomial) challenge. Although some methods based on the greedy framework can achieve ideal results, they bring unacceptable computational overhead, while the performance of other methods is unsatisfactory. In this article, we explicate the IM problem and design a local influence evaluation function as the objective function of the IM to estimate the influence spread in the cascade diffusion models. We redefine particle parameters, update rules for IM problems, and introduce learning automata to realize multiple search modes. Then, we propose a multisearch particle Swarm optimization algorithm (MSPSO) to optimize the objective function. This algorithm incorporates a heuristic-based initialization strategy and a local search scheme to expedite MSPSO convergence. Experimental results on five real-world social network datasets consistently demonstrate MSPSO’s superior efficiency and performance compared with baseline algorithms.